Godspeed, Curt Schilling

curt-schilling

This is the kind of baseball story you hate to even have to acknowledge, but cancer has found yet another member of those early to mid-90’s Philadelphia Phillies that were so much fun. This time, it’s Curt Schilling.

It seems like just yesterday that I was at the 1994 Home Run Derby, then age twelve. I was in awe of the guy, and he walked over to the first base line in Cleveland and signed my plastic baseball. He was humble, down to earth, and absolutely fan-accommodating on that day. That ball sits on a shelf at my parents house, and the pen long ago started to bleed into the cheap baseball it’s signed on. It’s just a great memory to look at with the 1994 All Star Game emblem on it.

Schilling was always a guy I liked – and this post is not meant to memorialize him in any way. But he was kind of like an everyday common man who had a blazing fastball. He was a nerd away from the field. He played Warcraft. He looked kind of like a Simpson’s character. What’s not to like?

And at first we admit to being skeptical that this Veterans Stadium-era Phillies cancer thing had legs, but now we’re not so sure. It’s eerily coincidental at the least. It’s also interesting that neither Schilling or any member of the media has commented on what type of cancer this is. It almost adds an extra level of concern to the matter, not that any type of cancer is a light matter.

A great point: cancer sucks. It absolutely sucks. The word is gross to say, and the world would be a much more pleasant place without it. It’s unfair, it’s ugly, and it’s incredibly sad.

You have to think a guy with the guile that Schilling has inside him will give this brutal disease a fair fight. We wish Curt well and hope to someday soon be reading about the most important victory of his life.